Monday, September 05, 2005
Stan Ovshinsky
Stan Ovshinsky, maverick inventor
---------------------------------
After getting my Ph.D. in 1962, I worked at ITT, and they paid $50,000 to Mr. Stanford Ovshinsky for a patent license on his “amorphous semiconductor” technology. ITT engineers watched it being demonstrated in Stan.’s lab, paid the $50 K, and then went home and tried it. But they couldn’t get it to work.
I was then assigned to the project.
Stan was one of history’s greatest con men, although he was also a truly creative scientist to some degree. His amorphous semiconductor device barely worked, but not reliably enough to be useful. However, it had the potential of being very cheap. He got big companies to invest half a billion dollars [see #3 below], over the next 20 years, without ever making a penny of profit. He always promised: “Just one more year of development, and it will revolutionize electronics.”
Stan was a genius at getting famous men (Gen. Colin Powell [#7], and the former Chairmen of GM and Chrysler [#7], and various Nobel Prize winners) to be consultants for his company and to be photogaphed with him, all smiling together. But they were always retired by that time, and feeling somewhat neglected. (Although they had been very successful people, they were not experts in his field.)
Stan had a big press conference and got on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal the next morning! [See #4.] By doing this sort of thing, he always managed to scrape up tens of millions of dollars, just barely before actually going bankrupt, and he was still doing that up until recently [#5]. However, he is now starting to win some big lawsuits (still being appealed) and might eventually collect a lot [#6].
Once, when things were not going well, but it was time for ITT to renew their contract for another year (and another $50K), Stan requested a meeting with the Chairman of ITT, promising to bring wonderful new stuff to demonstrate. I was present, in the luxuriously wood-panelled board room of the ITT building, on Park Avenue in New York City. Stan kept us all waiting, purposely showing up late, and then he made a grand entrance, with a coterie of uniformed Brinks guards, and a leather briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. This contained the new secret formula. But it turned out to be just a mumbo-jumbo chemical recipe, not any demonstration equipment, and we couldn’t tell if it was really any better than the old formula or not. (My boss had told me to keep my mouth shut, so I did.) To my amazement, the ruse worked, and the the ITT top management signed up for another year! (Stan was not an ordinary person. Instead, like Mal McLaren of Rutgers, he was a true genius, able to con people in ways that were almost impossible.)
Working days, evenings, and weekends in the lab, I and the guys who worked for me optimized the alloy, and it began to work better. I developed an electronic circuit that automatically corrected problems [#8], and then the new alloy worked just fine. A little gray cylinder of the alloy was mounted inside a glass “package,” of the standard DO-7 type [#8A]. We built a telephone switching system with that [see #4 again, and then #8B]. But ITT shut down their lab and completely quit the telephone business before we ever got into mass production.
Several times, Stan tried to hire me. For example, after I had quit ITT (instead of transferring to their new lab in England), Stan invited me to visit his company in Detroit, and see what progress they had made. To my surprise, when I got there, it turned out to be another attempt to get me to sign up as one of his engineers. But he never allowed his engineers’ names to appear in print — it was always just “Ovshinsky” — so I didn’t want to become an anonymous worker bee in his hive, and I never joined ECD. (I went to AT&T instead.)
I had designed and built a little aluminum box with switches and lights on the outside, and the DO-7 device plus a battery, etc., inside, and this successfully demonstrated that the device worked reliably. (I got U.S. Patent 3,448,302 on this, automatically cross-licensed to Ovshinsky.) I had given a few of those little demo boxes to Stan, and he used them to sell the concept to several famous companies, raising tens of millions of dollars each time. This allowed Stan's company ("ECD") to stay alive, in spite of the fact that each new investment failed to produce any profits. (The problem was that standard transistors were continually getting cheaper, but Stan wasn’t able to get his own costs down enought to be competitive.)
However, Ovshinsky had cross-licensed the patent rights, with ITT and with Motorola, and he convinced Motorola to deposit my alloy onto the surface of an integrated circuit ("IC"), which was then sold as the first-ever EPROM (electronically programmable read-only memory, now a commonly used device — see #2 ). This was featured on the cover of Electronics Magazine (#2). Even in the year 2003, it is still a contender to become the computer memory device of the future, replacing ordinary RAMs [#4]. The present alloy is almost the same as mine.
The alloy has been changed one more time, to become the material used in all modern CD-RW discs]. It works by the same old principle, except that it makes additional use of a small laser.
If you add it all up (from the news articles), Stan has used up more than half a billion dollars of investors' money, without ever making a penny of profit (#3). (Of course, he drew a high salary from his company, all that time.) However, I think Stan has finally made money from CD-RW memory material, and from the "Nickel-metal-hydride" batteries — possiby to become a lot of money, pretty soon (#5, #6).
Literature References
1. "Bistable Conductor," Alan T. Waterman, Physical Review, Vol. 21, 1923, page 540.
2. "Making It," Anon., Electronics, Sept. 28, 1970, page 4, and photo of ECD memory on cover.
3. "Electronics Pioneer Hunts for Profits," by Barnaby Feder, New York Times, July 28, 1987, page 6.
4. "Next Phase For RAM," by David Lammers, Electronic Engineering Times, June 23, 2003, page 1.
5. "G.M. Signs Electric Car Battery Deal," by Matthew Wald, New York Times, March 10, 1994, page D4.
6. Ovonics Collects Big Bucks From Japanese Battery Makers," Anon., Automotive Industry, Dec. 1997, page 9.
7. "ACS Honors Heroes of Chemistry," Anon., Chemical and Engineering News (Amer. Chem. Soc.), Sept. 4, 2000, page 50.
FOLLOW-UP:
Something potentially very big was announced recently, along the lines of Lit. Ref. 4 above. See
http://iconoclast2.blogspot.com
or click on colored word PRAM below.
PRAM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Also see http://jackgotmurdered.blogspot.com for more stories.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
After getting my Ph.D. in 1962, I worked at ITT, and they paid $50,000 to Mr. Stanford Ovshinsky for a patent license on his “amorphous semiconductor” technology. ITT engineers watched it being demonstrated in Stan.’s lab, paid the $50 K, and then went home and tried it. But they couldn’t get it to work.
I was then assigned to the project.
Stan was one of history’s greatest con men, although he was also a truly creative scientist to some degree. His amorphous semiconductor device barely worked, but not reliably enough to be useful. However, it had the potential of being very cheap. He got big companies to invest half a billion dollars [see #3 below], over the next 20 years, without ever making a penny of profit. He always promised: “Just one more year of development, and it will revolutionize electronics.”
Stan was a genius at getting famous men (Gen. Colin Powell [#7], and the former Chairmen of GM and Chrysler [#7], and various Nobel Prize winners) to be consultants for his company and to be photogaphed with him, all smiling together. But they were always retired by that time, and feeling somewhat neglected. (Although they had been very successful people, they were not experts in his field.)
Stan had a big press conference and got on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal the next morning! [See #4.] By doing this sort of thing, he always managed to scrape up tens of millions of dollars, just barely before actually going bankrupt, and he was still doing that up until recently [#5]. However, he is now starting to win some big lawsuits (still being appealed) and might eventually collect a lot [#6].
Once, when things were not going well, but it was time for ITT to renew their contract for another year (and another $50K), Stan requested a meeting with the Chairman of ITT, promising to bring wonderful new stuff to demonstrate. I was present, in the luxuriously wood-panelled board room of the ITT building, on Park Avenue in New York City. Stan kept us all waiting, purposely showing up late, and then he made a grand entrance, with a coterie of uniformed Brinks guards, and a leather briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. This contained the new secret formula. But it turned out to be just a mumbo-jumbo chemical recipe, not any demonstration equipment, and we couldn’t tell if it was really any better than the old formula or not. (My boss had told me to keep my mouth shut, so I did.) To my amazement, the ruse worked, and the the ITT top management signed up for another year! (Stan was not an ordinary person. Instead, like Mal McLaren of Rutgers, he was a true genius, able to con people in ways that were almost impossible.)
Working days, evenings, and weekends in the lab, I and the guys who worked for me optimized the alloy, and it began to work better. I developed an electronic circuit that automatically corrected problems [#8], and then the new alloy worked just fine. A little gray cylinder of the alloy was mounted inside a glass “package,” of the standard DO-7 type [#8A]. We built a telephone switching system with that [see #4 again, and then #8B]. But ITT shut down their lab and completely quit the telephone business before we ever got into mass production.
Several times, Stan tried to hire me. For example, after I had quit ITT (instead of transferring to their new lab in England), Stan invited me to visit his company in Detroit, and see what progress they had made. To my surprise, when I got there, it turned out to be another attempt to get me to sign up as one of his engineers. But he never allowed his engineers’ names to appear in print — it was always just “Ovshinsky” — so I didn’t want to become an anonymous worker bee in his hive, and I never joined ECD. (I went to AT&T instead.)
I had designed and built a little aluminum box with switches and lights on the outside, and the DO-7 device plus a battery, etc., inside, and this successfully demonstrated that the device worked reliably. (I got U.S. Patent 3,448,302 on this, automatically cross-licensed to Ovshinsky.) I had given a few of those little demo boxes to Stan, and he used them to sell the concept to several famous companies, raising tens of millions of dollars each time. This allowed Stan's company ("ECD") to stay alive, in spite of the fact that each new investment failed to produce any profits. (The problem was that standard transistors were continually getting cheaper, but Stan wasn’t able to get his own costs down enought to be competitive.)
However, Ovshinsky had cross-licensed the patent rights, with ITT and with Motorola, and he convinced Motorola to deposit my alloy onto the surface of an integrated circuit ("IC"), which was then sold as the first-ever EPROM (electronically programmable read-only memory, now a commonly used device — see #2 ). This was featured on the cover of Electronics Magazine (#2). Even in the year 2003, it is still a contender to become the computer memory device of the future, replacing ordinary RAMs [#4]. The present alloy is almost the same as mine.
The alloy has been changed one more time, to become the material used in all modern CD-RW discs]. It works by the same old principle, except that it makes additional use of a small laser.
If you add it all up (from the news articles), Stan has used up more than half a billion dollars of investors' money, without ever making a penny of profit (#3). (Of course, he drew a high salary from his company, all that time.) However, I think Stan has finally made money from CD-RW memory material, and from the "Nickel-metal-hydride" batteries — possiby to become a lot of money, pretty soon (#5, #6).
Literature References
1. "Bistable Conductor," Alan T. Waterman, Physical Review, Vol. 21, 1923, page 540.
2. "Making It," Anon., Electronics, Sept. 28, 1970, page 4, and photo of ECD memory on cover.
3. "Electronics Pioneer Hunts for Profits," by Barnaby Feder, New York Times, July 28, 1987, page 6.
4. "Next Phase For RAM," by David Lammers, Electronic Engineering Times, June 23, 2003, page 1.
5. "G.M. Signs Electric Car Battery Deal," by Matthew Wald, New York Times, March 10, 1994, page D4.
6. Ovonics Collects Big Bucks From Japanese Battery Makers," Anon., Automotive Industry, Dec. 1997, page 9.
7. "ACS Honors Heroes of Chemistry," Anon., Chemical and Engineering News (Amer. Chem. Soc.), Sept. 4, 2000, page 50.
FOLLOW-UP:
Something potentially very big was announced recently, along the lines of Lit. Ref. 4 above. See
http://iconoclast2.blogspot.com
or click on colored word PRAM below.
PRAM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Also see http://jackgotmurdered.blogspot.com for more stories.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
